


enigmas

by ruthlesslistener



Category: Homestuck
Genre: 'Poor kid' I say, Asperger Syndrome, Autistic Dirk Strider, Character Study, Dirk loves his friends but he doesn't like their noises, Gen, POV Second Person, Social Anxiety, Stimming, as I ruthlessly project onto Dirk, mentions of dirkjake, poor kid, sensory issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 07:12:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11732130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruthlesslistener/pseuds/ruthlesslistener
Summary: People aren't machines. They don't fit to a code, they aren't wired with a purpose, when you break them they knit themselves back together in ways that are funny and off and not-quite-right. They find humor in things that don't make sense, they convolute things to make others feel better. They stare, and their stares aren't like the blank, emotionless gaze of a robot awaiting a command, they're alive, they're piercing and moving and full of strange light.So all in all, you're not quite sure how to think of people.





	enigmas

**Author's Note:**

> *ruthlessly self-projects onto Dirk to ignore my surroundings* i love my awkward weeabo creamsicle son

People aren't machines. They don't fit to a code, they aren't wired with a purpose, when you break them they knit themselves back together in ways that are funny and off and not-quite-right. They find humor in things that don't make sense, they convolute things to make others feel better. They stare, and their stares aren't like the blank, emotionless gaze of a robot awaiting a command, they're  _alive_ , they're piercing and moving and full of strange light. They move in funny ways, ways that you think are supposed to convey messages, kind of like morse code, only morse code makes sense, has a rythem and a list of meanings to it that form hard, clear letters and numbers, messages that make  _sense._

They expect things, too, in ways, that robots don't, and it puts a pressure on you that isn't at all like the good pressing comforting feeling of a sheet of metal or the heavy weight of a good thick blanket, it's a pressure that leaves you squirmy, leaves you panicky, and you don't like the way it shorts out your brain, the way it makes you feel all gross and _wrong_ like every little bit of you got shifted out of place and you're not quite sure how to put it back together.

(Fiddling with wires usually helps. Fiddling with wires, tying and looping and connecting them until your fingers ache and your vision blurrs, that's right, that's good. It fits, it clicks, it shifts you back together bit by bit, and if it still isn't quite enough dropping down onto the wire grate under your apartment building and swinging your legs as hard as you can until the blood building up heavy in your feet is a tangable thing usually does the rest of the job.)

So all in all, you're not quite sure how to think of people.

Your friends, you love. That you're pretty sure of. That's the only word that the fierce, light, fluttering ache in your chest really fits, you think, and you certainly don't think of their existance as necessarily a  _bad_ thing. There's certainly a sense of goodness that sweeps though you when you see their letters and their colours dancing across your screen, click-click-clicking their way into place (and though their prescence is not a weight you can feel though their screens you can certainly almost hear the click-clattering of their keyboards in your mind, which is good, because the click-clattering of keyboards, like most hard noises, is a good thing that rolls around in your mouth like a piece of rock candy), and even if sometimes the way they speak and write confuses you, you're sure them conversing with you is a good thing. You've learned from your Bro on how to speak and act, after all, and your Bro was a movie star, well-loved by much of the world. You're sure that your rambling must be pretty good, even if sometimes finding the words to say and the way to write them is a little difficult because your mind has sounds and feelings and pictures on a three-dimentional plane instead of neat lines of letters and grammar in a two-dimentional rows.

But there's still something off about you. Something weird. You've never really thought it before, because there's no real way to compare yourself to the rest of humanity when the rest of humanity is all dead except for Roxy afloat somewhere in a sea of sentinant chess pieces somewhere you can't reach. Before, all you've had to talk to were your robots, and Maplehoof, and the stir-crazy gulls that looked at you with bright red-rimmed yellow eyes and raised their dusty black-streaked wings when you climbed out your window onto the roof of your little apartment and called back their cries when they sang out to the others among them. You liked their calls, you couldn't help yourself, the urge that always stirred and wriggled in your chest like a caught fish when you heard them was too much to  _not_ call back at them, and now you're pretty good at it, now you're one of them. You think you fit in just fine, with your pale skin and hair and gangly sharp limbs and long nose and sharp shades and orange splotches from the healing sunburns that always itched and peeled in the most inconvenient places. They let you pet them, sometimes, and their touch was good, you liked the way their smooth oily velvet feeling stuck to your skin, until you didn't, and then that was easily remedied with a splash of ice-cold numbing seawater and the press of sun-touched metal. But birds aren't humans, even if they are good company, and even the most raucous calls of the gulls weren't enough to prepare you for the babble that are human voices.

You've heard them before, of course. You've watched movies, and had videos of your Bro to watch to help you when you were young. But those movies were your Bro's movies, and they had volume control, and your Bro had a way of speaking that was nice and rolling and flat and sharp all at once that pulled at you in all the right ways, so the voices didn't bother you nearly as much as the voices of your friends did when your friends surrounded you. They're  _loud_ , and ridiculoudly strange, and the way the sounds roll over you fill you with a weird gross sensation that you know leads to bad moments where everything hurts and is too loud and is bad and the world stops spinning just right.

And it confused you, it confused you greatly, because they're not that much of a loud bad thing that you shouldn't be able to handle it, they're not as loud as clanging banging falling metal sheets, you should be able to handle it, you still loved them and felt the joy of seeing them as actual three-dimensional beings- but you couldn't, and the words weren't falling out of your mouth quite right, so you shut your mouth and sat silent and rock-bounced yourself on your heels while trying to imagine everyone's voices as the soothing robotic monotone of the A.R. speaking, or the strange rocking rythem of your Bro's voice that always felt like how clacking two pieces of wood together felt, and that helps a little. Still doesn't quite relieve the steadily-building tension rising in your chest like a coiling wire spring, but it helps. Jane gives you a bit of a strange look, (or at least you think it's a bit of a strange look, everyone's faces are writhing like flopping startled fish and the burning pinpoints of her eyes on yours filled you with a gross panicky feeling so certainly didn't look for any loner than you had to) but it's okay, the rocking was soothing, you could focus on how much you liked seeing your friends move and act after you started it so that was good. There was a certain energy to them when they were happy that you decided you liked, a certain way they moved their hands when they talked that was a lot more decisive than the vigorous flapping you did when you were mimicking a particularily pleasing sound, so watching them was good.

(You still had to shut yourself in and flap and rock and whine and clap to shake the tingling, lingering residues of their prescence off your skin later, and you were tired and wound up in ways that you weren't ever before, but you supposed it wasn't  _too_ bad, or at least not as bad as it could have been.)

But the pleasent distant buzzing white noise of your rock-bouncing and thinking is still enough for you to notice how different people are from machines.

And it's strange. And you're not certain how to think of it, what the slow rolling spiking tide of your emotions means just yet. All your life you had consistancy, you had rythem, you had balence, you had the gulls and the fish and the creatures with their predictable instinctive behavior and your shows with their timed episodes and your apartment with your things that have always been yours and your robots with their programming. You had always thought that was how things were supposed to be, predictable (not always, but enough), set into their little niches, with their own little quirks and schedules that can be all mapped out. And maybe you were supposed to guess that your friends might not be the same way, that they may be more than just lines of coloured text on a bright white screen, but hindsight is always clearer than foresight, and the knowledge of that little blip of insight is all there is keeping you from shivering hard enough to shake your bones and stepping back and screaming 'til your head is not a fuzzy mess anymore.

But you're Dirk Strider. You're Dirk Strider. You're Dirk Strider, and Striders always keep their cool (you would know, Bro said so, it's in your wiring, your code, it's what you're meant to do), so you ignore the welling indecisive fright swelling in you and the rising screech and you swallow it down and replace it with cool ironic quips instead. You're Dirk Strider, and you love your friends, and you're rocking and clicking hard-edged sharp sounds in your throat to poke away the sick  _wrongness_ of their voices, and you love the brightness painful achieness of the colours of their clothes, and the hot heavy weight of Roxy on your shoulder, and the hard bright triangular lines of Jake's grin, and the soft round lines of Jane's figure, so strange, so unlike the carapaces of robots and your own skinny, gangly body, so you're fine.

You're _fine_.

Humans really aren't like robots after all.

 

 


End file.
